It’s all about the clothes

Sunday

Aug 28, 2011 at 12:01 AMAug 28, 2011 at 2:00 AM

By Gwen ShriftStaff Writer

Having succeeded with books involving snow, a turkey, a sheep and monkeys, children’s book illustrator Lee Harper, who was raised in Pitman, Gloucester County and reside in Doylestown, put a penguin front and center on his drawing board.

The recently released “The Emperor’s Cool Clothes” is a visually and verbally whimsical retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fable, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The work is published by Marshall Cavendish of Tarrytown, N.Y.

Many grade-schoolers know Harper from his personal appearances, which have taken him around Bucjs County, Riverton, Gibbsboro and Collingswood.

“I like to keep in touch with little kids and see what they like,” says Harper, who has two grown children and two teenagers.

“The Emperor’s Cool Clothes” is set in “Arcantica,” a make-believe region where species from both poles coexist and shop at stores such as Cold Navy and Sunglass Igloo.

The emperor is a diminutive, sartorially obsessed penguin whose fashion-conscious courtiers include a polar bear dressed in hip-hop style. The villains of the piece are Paul and Radford Rogue, fur seal brothers who operate Two Rogues Cool Clothes.

The plot follows that of the Andersen story, with plenty of humor in Harper’s droll watercolors and the fanciful outfits his characters wear.

“I go online and shop for them,” he says of the Arcanticans’ fashions. “A lot goes into the character development — what kind of clothes they wear, where they go on vacation, what they like to eat.”

The story called for the emperor to have “a different outfit for every hour of every day.”

Knowing that his audience of 4- to 8-year-olds takes its fiction very seriously, he drew different costumes and labeled them according to the hour.

“Kids will be looking at that,” he says. “They look at every little detail. It’s almost a real world (to them).”

Having sketched the penguin’s wardrobe, Harper hung it all on a fantasy version of the kind of mechanical conveyor seen in dry-cleaning shops.

The Rogues promise the penguin a suit of clothes “invisible to anyone who’s not totally cool like you. ... So you’ll always know who’s cool, and who isn’t,” the seals promise the emperor.

The outfit, of course, does not exist, and the penguin ends up parading down the street in his birthday suit.

“Kids are so bombarded with advertisement,” says Harper. “These Rogues are metaphors for the advertising industry.”

Harper studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he says illustration was regarded as “selling your soul to the devil.” He managed the framing operation at a gallery in Philadelphia and later ran his own framing business at his then-home and a shop in New Hope.

“I started painting more when I was there,” Harper recalls.

One day, he was so engrossed in his own art, he failed to notice a customer, who walked out.

“I realized then, ‘I gotta do art, I’m not doing the right thing,’ ” he says.

Harper, who is from Pitman, Gloucester County, would make up stories for his children during long canoe trips in the Pine Barrens. His wife, Krista, “always told me, ‘You should do kids’ books,’ ” he says.

He initially rejected the idea. Later, he had a change of heart and, in 1994, attended a Philadelphia-area conference of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Networking with other participants prompted him to compile a portfolio, which, at the second convention he went to, captivated an art director and led to his first contract.

“I remember the day I was ‘discovered’ very clearly,” Harper says in an email. “I still have a perfect snapshot in my head of the clear skies over (Route) 276. I was listening to a CD of Mozart’s Concertos for Two and Three Pianos and inwardly rejoicing.”

In due course, Harper was assigned to illustrate “Turkey Trouble” by Wendi Silvano, “Woolbur” by Leslie Helakoski and “Looking for the Easy Life” by Walter Dean Myers.

Harper also wrote and illustrated “Snow! Snow! Snow!” before doing double-duty as author and artist on “The Emperor’s Cool Clothes.” Now, he is working on the illustrations for Silvano’s “Turkey Claus,” a sequel to “Turkey Trouble,” which is scheduled for publication in 2012.

He populates his books with anthropomorphized animals who talk, devise various funny schemes and get up to mischief.

“Sometimes, when I’m drawing, I’m laughing to myself,” says Harper.

His characters go through numerous revisions, and the work is not all two-dimensional. For the title page illustration in which the unclothed penguin sees himself garbed in regal finery, Harper modeled a penguin out of clay and positioned it before a real mirror to get the proper angle in the reflection.

His editors initially asked him to make the penguin bigger, an idea the artist resisted.

“No, no, I really wanted him to be small. I think that would be funnier, and kids could relate to him better,” he says.

Illustrator and editor compromised on Harper’s choice to paint the penguin’s backside as slightly lighter in color than the rest of him, as seen when the character admires himself in a mirror while wearing his new, nonexistent outfit.

“This was kind of scandalous. I wasn’t sure I could show his suntan lines on his little bottom,” says Harper.

For the final illustration, he kept the effect but made it more subtle.

But when he sought to make one of the Rogues look extra-bad by putting a cigarette in his flipper, the editors snuffed out the detail.

Quirky references abound, as in a pile of goods Paul and Radford buy with the emperor’s credit card — TVs, a personal watercraft, golf clubs, diving equipment, video game consoles, a box of smoked salmon and a baseball bat, among other items.

The latter is based on the fact that seals are often clubbed to death by hunters.

Harper says he imagined that “if a seal could buy anything he wanted, he’d buy a baseball bat.”

Besides the illustrations that accompany the text, the editors were taken with pencil sketches of the main characters and added them to the pages above the publication credits and the author’s note.

A miniature of Frostbite, the erstwhile hip-hop polar bear, this time dressed in nerd attire, appears on the inside front flap of the dust jacket. Carrying luggage and plane tickets, the Rogues flee across the back cover.

In place of the traditional author’s photograph, the artist drew a cartoon of himself wearing the emperor’s crown for the inside back flap of the dust jacket.

With five books done and another on the way, Harper’s success earned him another invitation to the children’s book society — this time as a speaker.

“I hit on something, obviously,” he says. “I feel like I found what I was supposed to do, and somebody noticed it.”

Artist’s website: www.leeharperart.com.

Gwen Shrift can be reached at 215-949-4204 or atgshrift@phillyburbs.com

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